Who’s That Girl

I’ve a well documented tendency to get seriously hooked on TV shows. Possible explanations for my disturbing condition include my mother’s Days of Our Lives habit, doing a BA (such limited contact hours! So much time for TV ‘studying at home’), and sharehousing with other likeminded folk in my early twenties.

The only defence I can make for my shameful viewing behaviour is that I’m fairly laid back when it comes to TV shows. Basically, I’m not going to bore you with senseless details of characters you don’t know and love the way I do. Unless you happen to mention Dwight K Schrute – in which case I will have no choice but to profess my undying love for him, my belief that we would have genetically superior offspring, and my overwhelming desire to be a beet farmer’s wife. And then you’ll have to excuse me while I throw myself through a cold shower.

I’m making one additional exception to my usual rule, though. Because New Girl, although it’s cheesy and American, is one of the best gosh-darn things you can watch right now.

New Girl is the story of a girl called Jess (played, beautifully, by Zooey Deschanel) who suddenly finds herself single in the most soul-crushing way imaginable (HINT: it features infidelity, a naked dance, and an oversized floor cushion. I wish I could say that these things happen only on TV). Jess finds a new place to live, complete with three new housemates, and goes about the process of mending her life.

So far, so schmaltzy, right? Except, you’re wrong. Because this isn’t a schmaltzy show. There’s something about the way New Girl is executed that’s inherently truthful which saves it from saccharine.

From Jess’s dorky sayings, to her housemates’ questionable personal habits, I challenge you to watch an episode and not find yourself nodding along in agreement, thinking of a friend, a brother, a past or present housemate, who does EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

But what really gets me about this show is how Jess moves on. Without going into too much detail (also, I don’t want to spoil the show for you, if you are yet to watch), New Girl offers an account of recovering from a hurt closer to how it really feels than anything I’ve watched, read or listened to. New Girl doesn’t resolve Jess’s broken heart by having her fall into the arms of one of her lovely-if-hygenically-challenged housemates, or the cutely compatible guy that she dates soon after finding herself single again (he buys her tickets to Paris for Christmas. These things, most certainly, happen ONLY on TV). No, New Girl doesn’t give a midtwenties break up the soft-lighting-and-vaseline-on-the-lense treatment.

Rather, New Girl shines a forensically-fluorescent-show-all-the-blemishes-and-scars light on the awkward fumbling that happens post break. New Girl tells it like it is - and thank goodness for that, because I was beginning to wonder whether I was the only one out there who has Hey Tiger conversations with herself in the mirror (youtube it, it’s brills).

I have an unfair advantage here, having watched the whole season of New Girl ahead of Australian broadcasting schedules, but I can say that New Girl is good, and truthful, and full-body-hugs-the-awkward right to the end. It’s because of this truthfulness that I’ve put myself out on an awkward limb in suggesting, no, imploring, you to watch New Girl, for your own good.

Also, Zooey Deschanel has inspired me to mix my prints. I hope she inspires you to do so as well.

Labels

As a classically trained sociologist, it’s my duty to rebel against Labeling and Labels as a postmodern, patriarchal, capitalist social construction.

Lately, however, I’ve been pondering the value of other sorts of Labels. No, it wasn’t as a result of a stuff up where two important Labels (Hons, Phd expected completion 2013) were left out of my list of qualifications.

Needless to say - Not a Happy Camper.

Rather, my recent pondering of Labels has come about as a result of wearing my first ever big Label garment, borrowed from Clementine Kemp. I’m going to be a tease and refuse to tell you what Label I’m referring to here. Suffice to say, though, it’s a good'un.

The true appeal of the Label doesn’t lie in any inherent property of the dress itself, although I appreciate the technical genius of the cut (it really is a marvel). The appeal of the Label lies in its very Labelness – that this garment signifies something over and above its garmentness, that it's special, significant.

To a Marxist, this is a classic illustration of commodity fetishism. But sometimes (and I can feel the ghost of Marx haunting me here) a little of a fetishised commodity is exactly what you need.

As Bill Cunningham writes: ‘Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life’. Whilst no-one but myself and a few eagle eyed fashionistats would know, once it’s on, that Clementine’s dress is a Label, knowing makes all the difference to me. The Label makes me stand taller, pull my shoulders back, and look the world square in the eyes, because there is this deliciously potent secret sewn into the cloth that grazes my shoulder bone. Like Katniss Everdeen’s dress of flames in ‘The Hunger Games’, a Label can make you a Girl On Fire.

The effects of the Label last long after the dress itself has been taken off. Typing this in my thirty dollar maxi dress, my worn out cardigan, and my woolly socks, I still feel that Label magic – taller, stronger. And this is why, I suspect, people will always be willing to part with more money than is decent for the privilege of owning and wearing a Label – this feeling of being lit up.

You’ve Got That One Thing

Hi, my name is Peggy, and I’m a One Directioner.

I know I shouldn’t be. I can’t help it, though. There’s something about those young lads that makes me pump up the volume when they come on the radio.

You see, it’s a struggle, being Cool. One moment loving Kings of Leon is a sure fire ticket to respectful nods and Meaningful Discussions about Lyrical Potency. The next moment, the same admission will be greeted with sneers, disparaging comments about Stadium Rock and Ghonnoreah, and iTunes suggestions that make you cringe (Nickleback. Yikes).

And, when Motion Banana Cycle Republic Indian Chinese Massacre get played on mainstream radio, you face the long process of starting from scratch with another band who have that same carefully studied unstudied air (C/F Bondi Hipsters – check them out on Youtube)

Digging deeper and deeper into the underground scene makes coming up into the light, bright world of POP! music a tantalising alternative to being Alternative. I blame my addiction to One Direction on this incessant quest further underground in the name of Cool. Yes, I know they are mass produced and stage managed (Simon Cowel is behind the whole thing, after all), but nonetheless, these lads have got that One Thing that makes me keep on listening.

And that one thing is that 1D are so wholesome and hopeful, in a time when pop music, indeed the world, is anything but. Yes, I know it happens as you get older (I turned 25 this year and am deploying the in-my-day’s with alarming frequency), but I find the relentless tits-and-arse of pop music traumatic. Songs about girls who don’t know they’re beautiful, or crushing on someone who has that One Thing, are just so darn Nice by comparison. And Nice is all the more valuable for being rare. Like a man who holds a door open for a woman, One Direction are a throwback to gentler way of being, and one I welcome in these sleazy and cynical times.

Just a quick thought: perhaps liking One Direction, or, more broadly, embracing Niceness, is symptomatic of being so underground that you’ve dug yourself clean through the centre of the earth and out the other side. In which case, 1D + Nice = Hipster Win.

Eating my Words: Big W and Coloured Denim

I bought a pair of coloured jeans yesterday.

I have been wearing them non stop (ok, not quite non stop, as I slept in my nightie, but pretty consistently nonetheless) since.

When coloured denim first blipped my radar a couple of years ago, my first response was: FART NOISES. I proceeded to ignore the trend, ostrich style. Head in the sand, baby. If I passed a hipster or seven wearing red, banana yellow, or sky blue jeans, I’d snort and proceed to denigrate them to my companions.

Last month, however, I noticed a rather fetching pair of electric blue skinny jeans in a Big W advertisement. I know, I know. I hear you. Big W?? Big Why-are-you-even???? And COLOURED DENIM? WHAT ABOUT THE FART NOISES??

I have written previously about the benefits of overlooking stylistic prejudices before, and, in a bid to overcome, decided to swing past the women’s wear section of The Dub before heading to home wares (cushion insert), hardware (3M hooks), and books (the Hunger Games Trilogy as a birthday gift).

WELL.

Aside from the decidedly budget change rooms, I found the experience a highly rewarding one. Big W Woden didn’t have the electric blue denims in stock, but that was fine, because I found a fabulous pair in the lushest shade of green (I believe the closest match is Juniper Green in Derwent pencils if you need a visual). I even loved the navy and gold print sleeveless blouse I had tried on, for arguments’ sake, with the jeans.

Better yet, the whole outfit, jeans and blouse (which I’m planning on pencil skirting tomorrow for work) came to LESS THAN $40.

And the store radio station played I Want To Know What Love Is immediately followed by Teenage Dream.

BELIEVE.

In the words of Elizabeth David, there are worse things to eat than your words. And when the reward is cheap-yet-awesome-and-versatile kit, I’ll happily eat a whole plateful, plus seconds.

In fact, I’m heading into the civic store next weekend. I’m mighty tempted by the aubergine pair…

Cheap Wine

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know there are things that I believe in spending money on, and things that I don’t.

For instance, I don’t think you should ever skimp when it comes to: American Apparel tights (yes, I’m obsessed), cardigans, gin, lingerie, perfume, and tea.

But, you can, and should, expect to economise on the following: handbags, shoes, costume jewellery, socks, sunglasses, and wine.

As the title of this post indicates, it is cheap wine with which I am concerned at present. I can, grudgingly, see the point in spending a couple more dollars on a bottle of wine that’s intended for drinking, particularly if the bottle is pretty and it’s a thanks-for-having-me present. There is no place, though, in my reality, for using expensive wine in cooking. Nor do I believe in blaming the wine if your bolognaise or bourguignon doesn’t turn out as well as you had hoped. You are the cook, you wield the wooden spoon, and, as such, it’s up to you, and not the ingredients, to make your food work.

This sounds a little harsh, but, really, it’s empowering. Too long have our food magazines promoted this ridiculous upper middle class idea of throwing fashionable, expensive 'good quality', pre-prepared ingredients together on a big white plate, and garnishing it with sea salt, as 'cooking'. That’s arranging, not cooking, and I find it hard to take seriously the credentials of a magazine when half of the dishes are of that ilk.

That’s not to say simplicity isn’t a virtue in the kitchen. On the contrary, what I love about cooking is how simple things – flour, water, salt, oil – can be transformed, through care and attention, into something so much greater than the sum of its parts – sourdough bread, for instance, is the result of these four things alone. It’s like Durkheimian mechanical solidarity on a plate, and it’s beautiful.

But back to the cheap wine.

I feel, after the above rant, that it’s only fair I share with you my favourite recipe for alchemically turning that half-used skanky bottle of red lurking at the back of the cupboard into something you can be truly happy to serve to your friends at a dinner party (and eat any leftovers while you do the dishes, listening to Cheap Wine by Cold Chisel, bathing in the sweetness of your irony).

With a little care and attention, and trust in your palette, you can get away with cheap wine. Which is a blessing, really, when you’ve spent all your money on tights (guilty as charged).

Cheap Wine Pears with Walnut Praline

Serves 4 (ish)

For the Pears
4 brown pears, peeled, halved, de-cored
Brown sugar – to start with, about ¼ cup, but you may need extra, depending on the wine
2 bruised cardoman pods
2 cloves
2 star anise
Nutmeg
Vanilla extract
Juice of an orange (and/or a strip of orange peel)
¾ of a bottle of cheap, skanky red wine (I normally have shiraz lying around, but you could use any red you have to hand)

For the Praline
¾ cup of walnuts
1 cup sugar
A little water

1) Preheat oven to 160 degrees.
2) Place the pears, sliced-side up, in a baking dish. Sprinkle with the brown sugar. Add the wine, the spices, vanilla and the orange juice.
3) Bake, turning every half hour or so, until tender. This will largely depend on how firm your pears are. I find that an hour and a half softens even the firmest of pears.
4) While you bake your pears, make the praline. In a small saucepan, place the sugar and a little water – I would probably say a few tablespoons – over a high heat. Boil the sugar and water until thick and amber-coloured.
5) Line a baking tray with baking paper. Spread walnuts out on the baking paper, and carefully pour over the toffee (remember, sugar burns HURT). While the toffee is still liquid, jiggle the sides of the baking paper to ensure that all the walnuts are somehow connected to the great land-mass of toffee. To paraphrase Donne, no walnut is an island. Place in freezer to chill.
6) Check your pears. They should be tender. Remove pears to an oven proof bowl (save time and washing up by using the bowl you intend to serve from) and place the poaching liquid into a small saucepan. Cover the pears with foil and return to the oven (dropped down to 100 degrees) to keep warm. If you are making this dish ahead of time, you can put the pears, at this stage, into the fridge, and just reheat them in a slow oven about a half hour before you want to serve them.
7) Taste test the poaching liquid. It’s here where you need to exercise your palette. Is the sauce too tart? Add some more brown sugar. Is the sauce too tannic? Add some orange zest and vanilla extract (I don’t know why this works but it does). Heat the poaching liquid, taste testing and adjusting regularly, over a high heat until it’s bubbling thickly and has a glassy sheen. Pour into some sort of serving vessel (I like using a dainty little milk jug, juxtaposing the wine-dark sauce, but then I can be a bit twee sometimes), and set aside.
8) By now, the praline should be completely set. Place into a large zip loc bag and bash with a rolling pin until the praline is roughly broken up – you want some power and some chunky toffee-nut pieces. Transfer to a pretty bowl to put on the table, so people can add extra praline to their pears if they so desire, or simply nibble on the chunky toffee-nut pieces as decorum levels take a nose dive (it’s after desert when the truth comes out, I tell you).
9) Serve the pears, sprinkled with a generous amount of praline and drizzled with your dark, rich, cheap wine sauce.

A Cup of Earl

‘A cup of Earl, darls?’ Clementine Kemp asks. I instantly relax, not only at the familiarity of our shared lexicon, but at the thought of a cup of Earl Grey, my favourite thing to drink, made just how I like it.

You are supposed to drink Earl Grey tea black, with a slice of lemon, and, maybe, some sugar. I drink my Earl Grey the way you are not supposed to. I like it medium-strong, with a decent splosh of milk, no sugar. In the words of the Prince song, CONTROVERSY.

It’s funny, the way that a particular beverage becomes part of the way you think about someone, a part of the way you understand their identity. Kitty Gilfeather, for instance, is a skinny flat white kind of girl. Jordan Hawthorne invariably orders a long black. MamaK likes her tea to be Dilmah, so strong you can stand a spoon in it, with skim milk and a sweetener.

I first drank Earl Grey staying at my grandparent’s house as a child. Picking, out of all the teabags in my grandmother’s cupboard, the one that smelt like the colour yellow, a smell I later found out was bergamot. I can’t remember developing a taste for Earl Grey black, so my grandmother must have added milk to my tea that first time I drank it, the way that you do for small children.

Try as I might (and I do try, on mornings when I’ve forgotten to buy a carton of moo juice and desperately need a cup of something warm in my hands while I get my head around the new day), Earl Grey tea, served as custom dictates, just doesn’t cut the mustard. My Earl has to have milk, and it has to be unsweetened.

It’s not Earl Grey how it’s supposed to be, but that’s why it’s my Earl. I wouldn’t want a cup of anything else.

Sunday Soup Sessions: South Beach Black Bean Soup

Sundays are the best days. I like Saturday, for sure, with its catch ups and outings and, more often than not, evening derring-do (last night a girlfriend and I took in some theatre. The show was called Naked Boys Singing. One does so love to support the arts).

Saturdays, though, carry the weight, or, more accurately, the burden, of expectation. They are, after all, the first day of the weekend, and weekends so often are hampered with great expectations for fitting in all the extra curriculars, pleasant or otherwise, that didn’t happen during the week.

Sundays are free from these expectations because, by Sunday morning, expectations have either been fulfilled or dashed (that genius outfit you spent all week planning either debuted spectacularly, or sits on the bedroom floor, a reject and a flop).

This gives the more highly evolved among us the opportunity to Be In The Moment (whatever that means, I am yet to find out). For those of us less evolved, Sundays present an irresistible invitation to undertake pleasurable little busy-nesses that didn’t quite warrant top Saturday billing, but are, nonetheless, important.

This, for me, usually involves making soup, the beauties of which are manifold.

Firstly, soup makes fantastic lunch food, and if you cook and portion it out on Sunday, you can have lunches ready made in your freezer for the rest of the week.

Secondly, soups are time consuming but low maintenance. You do need to be around (ish) for an hour or so to keep an eye on the stove, but you are free to engage in other busy-nesses that make Sundays so lovely (painting BOTH finger and toenails. Cleaning the shower while listening to Prince. Re reading Truman Capote. Trialing new eyeliner techniques in front of your freshly cleaned bathroom mirror – I finally got the knack of lining the inner rim. Subtle, yet effective. It’s my new favourite trick).

Thirdly, and finally, your neighbours are more likely to be home on Sunday, all the better to tease with the tantalising smells coming from your apartment. No, I’m not mean, but it is sometimes satisfying to know that that delicious garlic-onion-spices smell the whole neighbourhood is salivating over is all for me.

Bwahaha.

Today, I made South Beach Black Bean soup, adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat. I made this soup last year for Kitty Gillfeather and I to share one night, and, whilst it was Okay, it was not Omazing.

Never one to be defeated by a recipe, and with complete faith in the kitchen gospel according to Nigella, I attempted it again, this time with a couple of modifications.
I’m pleased to report that my faith in Nigella’s inherent rightness was rewarded, after a couple of hours of simmering, by a dark, deeply spiced, lime-spiky soup. The best kind.

Given its Cuban heritage, I feel it’s only appropriate that you eat a bowl of this with something rum-based to drink: a Cuba Libre, perhaps, or, if you’re a little out-of-left-field, like me, sarsaparilla and Bacardi over ice with a squeeze of lime.

Yet another reason why Sundays are the best day: they’re the only day when lunchtime drinking (infinitely more satisfying than evening drinking) is de rigueur. After all, we’ve got work in the morning…


South Beach Black Bean Soup (Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat)

(Makes three large portions)

200g black turtle beans
1 bay leaf
Olive Oil
1 red capsicum, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano
Zest of one lime, plus extra limes to serve (allow one per person for citrus fiends like me)
Sugar, salt, pepper, to season
1 tablespoon dry sherry
Sour cream, sliced avocado, dried chilli flakes and/or spring onions and coriander, to serve.

1) Cover the beans and the bay leaf with a generous amount of water in a medium sized saucepan. Bring to the boil and keep at the boil, topping up with more water as needed, until beans are beginning to tenderise, but, still have quite a bit of bite.
2) Meanwhile, in your largest saucepan, heat the oil and add your finely chopped onion and capsicum. Cook over medium heat until translucent, which should take about ten minutes.
3) Add the garlic, cumin and oregano to the onion and capsicum and cook a further five minutes. The mixture should be starting to colour, which is good. You want this mixture caramelised, almost to the brink of burnt, for depth of flavour.
4) Hopefully, your beans will be crunchy-tender by this stage. If so, add them, and their cooking liquid, to the large pot, and bring to the boil. If your beans are not quite ready, remove the onion-capsicum mixture from the heat. Return to the stove when the beans are just about ready.
5) Cook at a high simmer until the beans are completely tender. Add in the sherry and lime zest, and season to taste. Nigella’s original recipe suggests using a whole tablespoon of salt (admittedly for a larger quantity of soup than my specifications), which sounds like a lot, but bean dishes do tend to need a lot of seasoning to taste of anything at all, so taste test thoroughly and often and salt accordingly.
6) Locate rum, chill glasses.
7) Spoon soup into bowls and serve, sprinkled with any, none, or all of the following: sour cream, sliced avocado, dried chilli flakes, finely sliced spring onions, coriander, and lime wedges to squeeze over the soup on the side.
8) Viva Nigella, Viva Soup Sessions, Viva Sundays.